Distill Hiatus

I think this is a fantastic analysis of scientific publishing in general. In the event that the editors don&#x27;t decide to start up again, I hope they might decide to create the &quot;Distill Arxiv&quot; described. It was a brilliant format for the featured material.<p>A serious concern I have about self publishing (which doesn&#x27;t appear to be addressed, hopefully I didn&#x27;t miss it) is bit rot and long term format accessibility. arXiv (and traditional journals more generally) provides a reliable, versioned central repository. The contents appear in a predictable format and (mostly) adhere to an accepted set of styling conventions.<p>Today, you can retrieve scanned PDFs of many (most?) papers from the early 1900s. Other than the lack of color photographs and more simplistic figures, they&#x27;re largely the same as their more modern counterparts. (But not quite - the lack of DOIs is downright painful.) I suspect that the entirety of arXiv will still be readily available in some form 100 years from now provided society doesn&#x27;t suffer a total collapse; the same can&#x27;t be said of a one off website as described in the article. (Perhaps versioning it on GitHub will prove to be enough?)<p>Related, probably the only frustration I had will Distill was that articles had a tendency to rely on assets hosted by third parties. Those are particularly prone to disappearing unexpectedly in my experience. I fear that one off websites will make this issue significantly more common.

&gt; Another significant risk factor is having unachievable goals. We set extremely high standards for ourselves: with early articles, volunteer editors would often spend 50 or more hours improving articles that were submitted to Distill and bringing them up to the level of quality we aspired to. This invisible effort was comparable to the work of writing a short article of one’s own. It wasn’t sustainable, and this left us with a constant sense that we were falling short. A related issue is that we had trouble setting well-defined boundaries of what we felt we owed to authors who submitted to us.<p>As someone finishing a PhD, I think that doing LESS and doing it SLOWER is actually a very desirable thing for most of science. We are limited by how fast humans can wrap their heads around articles, and if we have fewer articles that are better written, that&#x27;s a huge compound gain!<p>To the Distill team, if anyone is reading this: I don&#x27;t think you should feel bad for being slow, or for doing &quot;few&quot; things at all. We humans to place big emphasis on superficial large numbers in the heat of the moment, but only good things withstand the test of time. I&#x27;ve only read a few Distill articles, but they were all really good and I can see myself coming back to most them 5-10 years from now. I don&#x27;t think any other academic journal comes close in the ratio of (total goodness)&#x2F;(total content). Good job Distill team for making a great thing, and summarizing the lessons learned so well in this goodbye article!<p>My only wish would be that you could find a way to continue to do auch good work that does not entirely rely on unpaid volunteering. In the end of the day volunteering only means some other institution bears the cost of supporting the volunteers.<p>For example: Could you get a Distill editor endowment to pay editors using donations throughout a non-profit fiscal sponsorship partner? Could you partner with a university, or even publisher, to support long term writing?<p>GOOD work takes TIME and is SLOW and we are bad at appreciating that. I hope the distill team keeps taking their time to put out good work, whatever it is they go do next!<p>Cheers to Distill!

Too bad. In my opinion, Distill was the best thing that had happened to publish in the last 5 years.<p>I do understand that there is a lot of burden for editors. Also, from what I see - a lot of serious research now ends up on arXiv, and it does not matter if it gets published in a reviewed journal. (At least, in the last 2 years in deep learning, some breakthroughs are only as a PDF on OpenAI or as a website by Nvidia.)<p>Still - for static papers, it is acceptable to submit them to arXiv. For interactive ones, Distill is (was?) the only suitable venue.<p>On a more personal note, I am in the process of writing a paper (interactive, on tensor diagrams) for Distill. So well, it will end up as a blog post. It is OK-ish - most of my quality blog posts had orders of magnitude higher impact than my peer-reviewed papers. Still - a persistent DOI, editorial help from Chris Olah, would be game-changers.

Thank you Chris, Nick, Sam and Janelle for putting things so eloquently. Distill is probably my favorite project I&#x27;ve had the fortune to contribute to, and that&#x27;s largely due to you and everyone else involved. I&#x27;ll continue to do my best to keep our &quot;beautiful artifact&quot; online indefinitely. &lt;3

Distill has been an amazing journal, and I appreciate the analysis for suspending operations. Distill provides a detailed explanation of what didn’t work

Sad to see this. But also not very surprising, given distill has had relatively few or no articles from outside the ediotiral team for years. The combination of extremely polished, interactive articles, and usually great depth made writing for distill a huge challenge. Which makes it not very surprising it was a huge amount of work for the editorial team - I wonder how many articles they helped with that never reached completion. Combined with the lack of incentive for authors to take on the huge amount of work (relative to working on research papers). Still, I hope it indeed inspires more researchers to have personal blogs with in depth articles.

This is so sad, it had such enormous potential. (Might be an opportunity for a lone blog to take the helm.)